Three Cards to Midnight: A Scary Fun Romp

According to their Manifesto: “For us [Big Finish Games], story has always been the core of our games and this is especially so for Three Cards to Midnight.” So we will start there. We meet Jess, who is trying to piece together mysterious events regarding her parent's whereabouts on and around her thirtieth birthday. There is not much more I can say without spoilers.

The game does a great job of dropping plot points on the fly. You’ll start finding out progressively creepier things about Jess’s past and family until you reach a satisfying and dramatic climax. Finding out who Jess can trust is the kind of “what happens next?” feeling you get from a good, suspenseful, book.

It’s the first “casual” game I’ve played where the genre mystery/suspense delivered on the suspense elements that keep me turning pages in books of that type. To be fair, target audience plays a big part of it here. Though it is rated Teen, not Mature, this has more to do with Hitchcock. It leaves things to the imagination and doesn't lace things with pointless profanity, which helps solidify the tone of the game. This isn’t Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys mystery fare: fans of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe and their literary successors will be right at home.

While the story is excellent on its own merits, it stands out because of how it gets thematically tied into the gameplay.

At its simplest, TCM is a hidden object game with some puzzles. There are plenty of good games in this genre, but they don’t make things as interesting. The scenes where you seek and find are all tied to Tarot cards, which are drawn in a reading you are having with some guy who is part soothing, part creepy, and in a hurry of some kind. You’re floating in a strange void and everything has a blue halo and a weird echo during these readings. Finding out who the guy giving the reading is brings all kinds of satisfaction.

So instead of wandering around looking for clues, each card triggers a memory, opening a scene to search for objects. When the memory is triggered, Jess and the card reader’s dialogue will dig up a few important words that Jess remembers in relation to the place. Instead of finding a list of objects, these words are keys that Jess has to find objects associated to in order to unlock related memories.

For instance, if Jess remembers the word Box, objects like a toy, bread, sheet music, shoes, a car, wood (toy box, bread box, music box, shoe box, box car, box wood) help Jess unlock memories.

It’s a more interesting challenge than just finding stuff on screen, but it also ties the gameplay and story together. At a conscious level, you are finding things that Jess might need to trigger an important memory. Your mind starts scrounging, looking for associations, just like Jess trying to connect snippets of memory. It’s a very sophisticated and effective way to get you into the protagonist’s skin.

The only problem is that maybe once every few scenes you’ll think of something you weren’t supposed to, or think of it differently. Once, looking for words associated to “night” I was disappointed that clicking on a watch cost me a miss. Another example involved clicking on paper to associate with “back” falling through: said sheet of paper being needed to associate with the word “time” instead. Paperback and time sheet both strike me as valid, so that is kind of arbitrary, but it didn’t come up often.